Mustafa Abusalah Blog

A question came to my mind today when I saw a new message on Facebook indicating that to keep Facebook free, customized ads based on members interests will be shown on our profiles or dashboard. Today as well I saw a suggested list of people that I might know on LinkedIn. One of them is a friend of mine that we have never exchanged an email or even connected on social media. This friend has 0 friends on his friends list so there is no common people between us. Same question came to my mind again. How the social media and search engines are able to make this semantic networks! Google Search uses our search history to show results that might be of our interests, it also use the same information to show related ads. Google is a free search that we use and they make money out of the ads. It is a mutual benefit, we search for free and they make money from ads we see based on our search keywords. Same scenario in Social Media, so Facebook and LinkedIn, and other Social N...

Jumo , a new venture started by Chris Hughes, Facebook’s cofounder and the social media maven behind Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, launched in public beta today. Billed as a social network for social causes and activism, the service aims to help people find and discover issues they care about with their friends, keep tabs on them through news and updates, and over time, help support their work and raise awareness. A nonprofit itself, Jumo is the latest example of broad efforts throughout the industry to bring the energy and innovation of venture-backed startups to the world of philanthropy . Getting started with the service requires you to connect your Facebook account, after which you’re asked to select various issues, ranging from Arts and Culture to Education, Health, and Human Rights, and rate them according to your level of interest. Jumo then suggests charities and organizations to follow out of the 3,500 it has signed up for its initial launc...

1- Login to your Blogger Account and go to Design > Edit HTML and click on the check box which says " Expand Widget Templates "  2- Inside the html code look for the tag: <post-header-line-1/> to add the buttons on the top of the posts or <data:post.body/> to add the buttons to the end of the posts, Directly after one of those tags add the below code:   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'> <div align='right'> <script src='http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1'/><fb:like layout='button_count'/> <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-via="YourTwitterUsername">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> </div> </b:if> 3- Save and Your Done

To add Facebook Like button to your blogger blog posts simple follow the below steps: 1- Login to your Blogger Account and go to Design > Edit HTML and click on the check box which says " Expand Widget Templates "  2- inside the html code look for the tag: <data:post.body/> Directly after this tag add the below code: <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'> <div> <script src='http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1'/><fb:like layout='button_count'/> </div> </b:if> 3- Save changes You may change the feel and look of your like button by changing and adding attributes to the fb:like tag, those attributes are: layout - there are three options. standard - displays social text to the right of the button and friends' profile photos below. Minimum width: 225 pixels. Default width: 450 pixels. Height: 35 pixels (without photos) or 80 pixels (with photos). bu...

Facebook issued a stern warning to independent developers Monday in response to reports that some applications on the site were sharing identifying information about users. At the same time, a Facebook engineer said media coverage of the leak has exaggerated how much information can be, and has been, shared with third parties. "Our policy is very clear about protecting user data, ensuring that no one can access private user information without explicit user consent," Facebook engineer Mike Vernal said on a blog used by people who develop apps for the site. "Further, developers cannot disclose user information to ad networks and data brokers. "We take strong measures to enforce this policy, including suspending and disabling applications that violate it." A report by The Wall Street Journal found that some of Facebook's most popular apps, including the game FarmVille by social network game company Zynga, were being used to share users...

The below script adds Facebook Like button to your website despite the scripting language used, so it works with coldfusion, php, jsp, ruby on rails, etc. This implementation is based on Graph API. Also the code below can be used to add Facebook Like Button to wordpress and blogger blogs. The settings in red can be customized to fit with your website, the code is below: <iframe  src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2F www.yourwebsite.com %2F&amp; layout=standard&amp;   show_faces=true &amp;   width=230 &amp; action=like&amp; colorscheme=light&amp; height=95 "  scrolling="no"  frameborder="0" s tyle="border:none;  overflow:hidden;  width:230 px;   height:95 px;"  allowtransparency="true"> </iframe> replace www.yourwebsite to your website address. showfaces is set to true if you want the faces of the people who pressed on like button to appear on the like widget, else set...

In this tutorial we will learn by full coldfusion Graph API code example how to publish on your wall and your friends walls. This application uses new oauth authentication method. The code is divided into four files: we will first start with a file called index.cfm: <cfoutput>         <!--- Your FB application IDS --->       <cfset api_key = ""/>     <cfset secret_key = ""/>     <cfset appID = ""/>     <!--- create a connection to the fb graph cfc --->     <cfset graphCFC = createObject("component", "graph").init(#appID#, #api_key#, #secret_key#) />     <!--- If user is authenticated or his access token is set create a cookie --->        <cfif not isdefined("cookie.access_token") and isdefined("url.access_token")>         <cfset cookie.acce...

Below is an alternative Coldfusion Facebook Authorization method to the earlier one that was published yesterday. This method is simpler and does not require much code. You should create two file, one that will redirect the user of your application to Facebook API to get authenticated and then authorized, the first file is below:     <!--- Your FB application IDS --->     <cfset api_key = "xxxxxxx"/>     <cfset secret_key = "xxxxxx"/>     <cfset appID = "xxxxxx"/>     <!--- Redirect to get authonticated and authrorized from facebook, in the redirect_uri you should write the url of your website where you want the user to be redirected after authroization --->    <cflocation url="https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=#appID#&redirect_uri=http://www.sms4all.info/fb/login1.cfm" addtoken="no"> The second coldfusion file is the main page where the user...

Facebook has launched a new FB API called Graph that simplifies FB applications development, the new Graph API allows website owners to create Single Sign On (SSO) with Facebook and allow websites owners to be able to import a lot of users information but after their permissions. The code below written in Coldfusion gives an example on how to Create FB login/logout button and then how to retrieve the created cookie, and use it for further development:     <body>   <cfoutput>     <!--- Your FB application IDS --->     <cfset api_key = "XXXXXXXXXXXXX"/>     <cfset secret_key = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX"/>     <cfset appID = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX"/>     <!--- Facebook login/logout button --->     <p><fb:login-button perms="email,user_birthday" autologoutlink="true"></fb:login-button></p>     <!--- Facebook login/logo...

Despite the number of interruptions I had today, I was able to produce the below video tutorial that demonstrates real time example showing how to embed Google ad-sense inside your Facebook application.

When using stream.publish method some facebook application developers face a common problem which is that the message is appearing on the wall while the attachment argument which is used to post media stuff like images and videos does not appear. The main problem behind this is the format of the attachment array, you should make sure that you wrote the array in the correct way, some tips are below: If you are using .Net or Coldfusion or another programming language the format of the array and array of array is not the same so you have in some languages to replace the single quotation( ' ) with double ( " ). The array is presented in some language with brace ({}) and array of array is ([{}]) So for the below example in php: $attachment = array( 'properties' => array('Votes' => array( 'text' => 'Members Voted', 'href' => 'http://blog.abusalah.info/'), 'ratings' => '5 stars'), 'media' => ar...

As recently facebook stopped supporting the feedstory publishing method to publish news on users wall and application developers from now on can't create feed templates. Facebook released a new methods to do so which are: FB.Connect.streamPublish stream.publish Facebook.streamPublish I figured out those new methods when I was building a new facebook application yesterday to predict who will win the soccer match between Egypt and Algeria tonight. It took me sometime to succeed in publishing the story on the wall, so I will share with you my experience and how I solved it out in Coldfusion. As I build my applications using the work of Andrew Duckett who created the Facebook Rest Client Component , I will start from FacebookFBMLCLient.cfc file which contains the methods that communicates with facebook APIs. As I have used one of the three methods above which sounded the best as I guess, this example will be based on stream.publish method. The first step is to add the following method...

Google has recently loosened its AdSense Terms of Service so publishers can run other contextual targeted ads along with Google AdSense, but the change may be because Google wants to run their ads in publishing vehicles alongside other advertisements (like the ads running within Facebook). Steve Rubel thinks that Google AdSense ads will soon be coming to the Facebook applications Google has been slowly rolling out, especially after the quote from Eric Schmidt in AdAge : “How will those developers get paid for those services? We would like to have our ads in those applications.” Would you like to see Google AdSense in Facebook Apps with the current FB applications publishing? First you should have a face book application with hosting service. Second you should have a google adsense account if you don't have one go to google and create one. Create adsense ads that you want to embed in your FB application(s). Put your adsense code in empty html page and add some keywords inside thi...

To develop a success Facebook application and make your application popular you need to enable a story publishing on the wall of the members who uses your application. To do so in coldfusion what you have to do is to follow the tutorials by Gavin Vincent ( Using json and the Feed Preview Console ) In the tutorial by Gavin, to publish the story on your wall you have the member must publish the story by pressing on the publish story button, but how can you enforce members to publish the story to make your application more popular? It is so simple to do so, but how? First of all make your application, the form and the action, in the action page don't publish your application result, ask the user to press on a continue button, this button is the feedstory form, then when the user gets the JSON publish story popup window and press on publish he will be able to see the result, see the following code: <cfset json = '{"content": {"feed": {"template_id":...

When I was developing my first test Face Book plugin I had the following errors that annoyed me for a few hours until I figured out my mistake. 404 Error: Error while loading page from [App name] Received HTTP error code 404 while loading http://www.mywebserver.com/facebookapp There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of test are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks 405 Error: Error while loading page from [App name] Received HTTP error code 405 while loading http://www.mywebserver.com/facebookapp There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of test are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks Solution I figured out that the solution for this error is simple as I used to fill in the Canvas Callback URL in facebook applic...